The assignment for this seminar was to design our own material. Here comes the first question why bother making our own material when teachers have course books or there are many published materials available. The greatest value of doing this probably lies in promoting a greater understanding of the learners’ need, context, language and culture appropriacy and gaining an empirical knowledge of learning theories (Jolly & Bolitho, 1998:111). By doing so, teachers will also develop the awareness of setting their own criteria for evaluating the produced materials.

The first step to designing the material is to find a framework to synthesize the whole process consistently. The one my college Bader and I chose was Jolly and Bolitho’s materials writing framework because we agreed to their view that effective material writing is a process, in which writers learn the process competence (Jolly & Bolitho, 1998). Besides, this framework seems more accessible to us, the novice material writers (see picture below).

To identify the learners’ needs, after the discussion about our contexts, both of us agreed that learners need to acquire some language beyond the course book and meanwhile broaden their horizons by linking learning to the real-life issues. Based on this concept, we decided to adopt the humanistic approach, which refers to “one which respects materials users as human beings and helps them to exploit their capacity for learning through meaningful experience and to connect what is in the book to what is in their minds (Tomlinson 2013; 139)”. In other words, with the materials, the learning experience of target language should be personalized, localized and made meaningful. Considering the fact that learners are students aged from 16 to 18 for China and Kuwait, we considered the learning objectives as to raise the cultural awareness and develop critical thinking. In this view, we need to find a common topic which could potentially engage the learners from both countries. “Silk road” could not be a better topic when students share the history and the “new belt new road” is currently a hot issue involving the two countries.  Therefore, there must be various media addressing this topic, which allow us to achieve authenticity of the material. Then, the first three steps seem to have been completed.

We also discussed students’ age, level, learning preferences and the classroom setting. In light of these, reading became the priority. As for the reading text, an article from The New Yorker was selected. The choice of genre reading allows the learners to engage in critical thinking about this hot topic and broadens their horizon about international and cultural issues. As for the task design, the material consists of a lead-in question of looking at pictures and the teacher can elicit the topic and relevant vocabulary. The next step is to read part of this authentic article from The New Yorker which talks about the new silk road initiative in China. A definition of some vocabulary is provided for some words we consider to be difficult for the learners. The teacher can ask the learners to refer to the definitions if they don’t know the meaning of the words.  In the post-reading phase, learners should address some comprehension questions about the article and try to identify some benefits and concerns about this major project.

Regarding physical production, the criteria for evaluating the use of visuals created by us two weeks ago were adopted when choosing the visuals. The video about making the layout of materials on the Youtube helped us produce the final version.

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Reflection of the whole process:

Having been given the feedback from other colleges, I realized we didn’t fully understand the linear process of creating material. Particularly, we missed two key elements: learning theories and the differences in exercises, activities and tasks, together with how they inform each other in material design.

Regarding the purpose of reading, readers expect to understand what they are reading. In this sense, exercises, activities or tasks should be designed to achieve this initial goal.  Before the reading material design, 4 elements need bearing in mind: (Vaezi;2006)

Text characteristics: Examine the text and identify learners’ linguistic difficulties.

• Words and grammatical structures
• Appropriacy of the topic

Pre-reading tips: Take the following into consideration to make the process of reading more comprehensible

• provide the necessary background
• raise language awareness (deal with linguistic difficulties)
• lighten students’ cognitive burden

During-reading tips: Encourage active and dialogical reading to achieve comprehension.

• Predicting
• Reacting
• Guessing
• Questioning
• Arguing
• Evaluating
• Summarizing
• Placing a text within one’s own experience.

Post-reading tips: Check students’ comprehension and then lead students to a deeper analysis of the text.

It can be seen from above that linguistic barriers should be identified and overcome with proper task designs before reading. Meanwhile, strategies for developing reading abilities should be embedded in instructions to facilitate learning during reading. Besides, comprehension-checking and the readers’ cognitive engagement in the text should not be overlooked.  Hence, effective design of exercises, activities and tasks could be the focal element. However, how are they different?

Exercises, activities & tasks: (Richards 2014)

An exercise is a teaching procedure that involves controlled, guided or open-ended practice of some aspect of language. A drill, a cloze activity, a reading comprehension passage can all be regarded as exercises.

The term activity is more general and refers to any kind of purposeful classroom procedure that involves learners doing something that relates to the goals of the course. For example singing a song, playing a game, taking part in a debate, having a group discussion, are all different kinds of teaching activities.

A task is normally defined as follows:

• It is something that learners do, or carry out, using their existing language resources or those that have been provided in pre-task work.
• It has an outcome which is not simply linked to learning language, though language acquisition may occur as the learner carries out the task.
• It is relevant to learners’ needs.
• It involves a focus on meaning.
• In the case of tasks involving two or more learners, it calls upon the learners’ use of communication strategies and interactional skills.
• It provides opportunities for reflection on language use.

Clipped from: http://www.professorjackrichards.com/difference-task-exercise-activity/

From the definitions, we can see the three terms are intertwisted but each has its own focus. Exercises are suitable for raising language awareness, which focus on “forms” while tasks require the use of the language to convey “meaning” in discourse. Activities are the least controlled, which covers almost every aspect of the learning process.

As mentioned above, linguistic features are the focal element of achieving comprehension. In our text, much rhetoric language is used, particularly metaphors such as: streamlining the transport, arteries of the modern world etc. In this case, we should have made some exercises to raise learners’ language awareness in pre-reading part. The definition from the dictionary doesn’t necessarily contribute to the understanding of the meaning between lines let alone beyond lines in reading. On the contrary, without a knowledge of the rhetoric language, the definitions may confuse learners. Also, we should have designed more collaborative activities to check the comprehension of the text while reading. For example, we could ask learners to discuss the real meaning of some metaphors first, and then swap the partners to exchange opinions. Another deficiency of our design is that we didn’t instruct learners to adopt certain strategies to reading, which could slow down the reading speed, especially for learners who haven’t fully aware of using reading strategies. There are also some flaws in the layout such as the waste of space, the mismatch of visuals and lead-in tasks.

In the whole process, we should have employed the evaluation criteria for the material design we already made but for some reasons, it totally slipped our mind. Making materials is a dynamic process which entails a lot of knowledge and patience. This is a valuable experience, from which I have learnt a lot.

References:

Jolly, D and Bolitho, R. 2011. A framework for materials writing. In Tomlinson, B. Materials Development in Language Teaching. 2nded. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp107-135.

Richards, J.C. (2014) Difference Between Task, Exercise, Activity. Available: https://www.professorjackrichards.com/difference-task-exercise-activity [Accessed May 13 2018].

Vaezi.,2005. Theories of reading. IranianLanguage Institute Language TeachingJournal Volume 1, Available: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/theories-reading [Accessed May 16 2018].